Author: Peter

Is low code replacing traditional development?

Originally posted on SogetiLabs: https://labs.sogeti.com/is-low-code-replacing-traditional-development/

Spoiler alert; no.

Low code vs Traditional Dev

My colleague, friend and SogetiLabs Fellow Daniel Laskewitz and I frequently talk about this topic. His field of expertise as Microsoft MVP covers the Microsoft PowerPlatform including low code systems like Power Automate (formerly Flow).

All too often people see a division between low code and traditional development using languages like C#, Java, TypeScript and Go.
In the real world however, these systems work together perfectly.

Most of the times, you cannot solve a problem with only low code. Think about scenario’s where you should link to old legacy systems or complex API calls. In those cases low code without any enhancement cannot natively connect to those systems.

Behold custom connectors

In the Microsoft ecosystems, custom connectors allow you to bridge this gap. This way, the low code system can interact with any system you write a connector for. This may be common knowledge, but the fact is that most developers do not see how big this really is.

This means you can link any PowerApp, Microsoft Flow, or LogicApps to your custom connector, and reuse those within your entire organisation.
You could even publicly publish these if you have a service you want to expose. So if you are an ISV, this can help you get more traction on your product.

Bridging the gap

In the end it all comes down to developers of any system and language understanding the capabilities of the platforms they and their companies are using. For low code developers this means sometimes calling in the help of traditional developers. And more importantly, this also means traditional developers should learn that these low code systems can help you simplify (and thus speed up!) your development by using ready-to-roll systems and connectors available to you.

As there are over 325 connectors available, that should really speed making connections up!

Get started!

Want to explore custom connectors? Look at these resources or feel free to contact me or Daniel, we strongly believe bridging this gap between low code and traditional dev is key for succes in the future of development!

Education in a 5 feet economy

Originally posted on SogetiLabs: https://labs.sogeti.com/education-in-a-5-feet-economy/

Our Prime Minister Mark Rutte prepared us; the 5 feet economy could be here for a while. How does that work in education? And what problems do we see around us?

Technology Leaders

I (try to) teach coworkers and clients on a regular basis, and do this mostly on-site to get the interaction going between everyone in the room, and also to get a sense of how people react to my presentation or my talk. I personally find it hard to get the same feedback while working remotely.

Mind you; we are ‘Technology Leaders‘ and are capable of doing our job and all sessions remotely. We have the tech, but do we really have the same impact? At this moment, we do not have a choice, and have to do things online.

Education Online

As a father-of-three, I see these issues also on the side of education. Kids in pre-school really learn a lot in the classroom, and also from their friends in class. Want to be engaging and keep the attention of your coworkers? Try doing that for 6 or 7-year-olds…

My belief is that, especially for children, learning from each other is key. This cannot be replaced by an online tool. Still, in these ‘5 feet times,’ you have to make concessions. Digital skills are important, so make sure your kids and your friends can work online.

I see schools struggle with Microsoft Teams, Skype, with MOOC environments and with technology in general. I see this as a fail from IT companies; We always talk about inclusion, but it is still difficult to get everyone online working together. We have done a very good job making sure ‘we’ the IT people can do everything online, but we see educators or parents in general struggling with technology.

Help the educators, help each other

Big things start small; My door is always open, and I (time permitting) am always available for a quick tip or some help. Keep in mind that using Teams or Skype or Zoom is second-nature to ‘us’, for some parents or teachers this can be challenging. By helping another parent, simply by explaining how a tool works, you already have one more person that uses the tool. Maybe you can lend out a spare laptop for someone not having those resources. Maybe you can fix their internet, or setup their environment.

Small things count, we can make a difference together.

Does language matter?

Originally posted on SogetiLabs: https://labs.sogeti.com/does-language-matter/

In my previous blog I stated my learning goal for 2020: Learning (or getting a better understanding) of the Go language. Currently I’m studying various courses, and have to give huge credits to Todd McLeod for his excellent work on courses on this subject.

Working with what you were given

In many cases I have to work what is given. If I am helping a client running Java with Docker, I cannot simply move them to another language or framework, just because that seems a better technical solution. I have to keep in mind that people and companies have invested in a language or framework, and sometimes it seems almost a religious feud (Windows vs Linux) instead of an objective view on the subject. So in a way, a language does not matter in my work as a consultant or architect. I have my preferences, but cannot force them onto a group just for sake of my own reasons.

Let’s Go! (pun intended)

Go is a very elegant and fast language. Testing is built right into the language, as is documentation. It pretty much runs on any OS, and does that really fast.

The authors (Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson) wanted to address criticism of other languages in use at Google, but keep their useful characteristics (Wikipedia):

  • static typing and run-time efficiency (like C++)
  • readability and usability (like Python or JavaScript)
  • high-performance networking and multiprocessing

In Go everything revolves around ease of programming and frankly, it is just plain fun coding in Go! I’m amazed with the speed of coding and simplicity of concurrency. Numerous IDE’s are available, making it easy to start with the language.

What language do you choose?

If you are in a greenfield environment, or want to create services that have the need for speed; think beyond your comfort zone. Experiment with languagues and frameworks. See what fits for your purpose.

In any case, take a look at Go with your team, and let me know what you think of it!

2020: Keep on learning

This blog was originally posted on SogetiLabs: https://labs.sogeti.com/2020-keep-on-learning/

As the new year starts, many of us have New Year’s resolutions, and many of those will eventually perish within a month or two.

New Year, New Technology

I don’t have any resolutions. The only thing I try to do each year is to learn a new technique or language. Please note that new means new to me and not necessarily a brand new technique.

Why? In my day-job I focus on designing cloud native systems and architecture, and most of my ‘programming’ is done in Visio and PowerPoint. As my roots are in Software Engineering, I keep myself up-to-date by learning new languages and techniques.

For the upcoming year I’ve already made my choice. I started out with the following short-list.

  1. Scala
  2. Rust
  3. Go

Creating the short-list

The reason I chose these techniques is not random. In my work as an external examiner for the University of Applied Sciences Avans and Fontys in the Netherlands, I see the work of many students each year. They inspire me to look at specific techniques that normally do not cross my path. In my day-to-day work, the most used languages are C#, TypeScript, Java, and JavaScript languages and frameworks like Angular.

1. Scala

Scala is a general-purpose programming language providing support for functional programming and a strong static type system. Designed to be concise, many of Scala’s design decisions aimed to address criticisms of Java.

Wikipedia

Functional programming is something that I do not see often in my day-to-day job, so I was intrigued by the capabilities of this language. Also, some very fast and popular software is written in Scala. Examples are: Apache Kafka, Apache Spark and Akka.

2. Rust

Rust is a multi-paradigm system programming language focused on safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but is designed to provide better memory safety while maintaining high performance.

Wikipedia

Originally invented by Mozilla and used within Firefox and Dropbox. Rust has been the “most loved programming language” in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey every year since 2016, so that drew my attention.

3. Go

Go, also known as Golang, is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go is syntactically similar to C, but with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency.

Wikipedia

Go has been around for quite some time, and has an impressive list of applications that were built with the language. Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker and the list goes on.

Choosing my 2020 technique

For an internal project, we were looking for a tool to provides us programmability against a multitude of APIs. Instead of grabbing an off-the-shelve product, I investigated tools and frameworks that could help us build an MVP, fast and reliably. This eventually made me look into Terraform Custom Providers.

In Terraform, a Provider is the logical abstraction of an upstream API. This guide details how to build a custom provider for Terraform.

https://www.terraform.io/docs/extend/writing-custom-providers.html

Terraform will let you wrap any API, so it will enable us to wrap our ITSM tooling, Monitoring tooling and what have you not.

As Terraform and the custom providers are written in Go, that was my main reason to dive into this language. I’ve created a Github repo with an example custom provider, find it here on Github.

Keep on learning

I’m curious if any of you are also keen on ‘staying relevant’ and want to keep up with new techniques and languages. And, what techniques and languages do you try out and investigate? Please feel free to let me know, and contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter!

Infrastructure-as-Code with Pulumi

Using a public cloud like Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS? Chances are you’ve been using templates like ARM or CloudFormation.

Hashicorp has done a terrific job making Terraform with the ability to template any API, and deploy and manage stacks in Azure, AWS and many, many more.

I’ve been following Pulumi for a while, and their approach is a bit different than the previous stated tools.

Continue reading “Infrastructure-as-Code with Pulumi”

Sync your Outlook 365 calendar to Google Calendar with LogicApps

Sometimes it is hard to keep your spouse up-to-date on all the sessions and events work-related. Most of the times I’ve been able to duplicate calendar items that are relevant for my ‘better half’.

Obviously manual work makes me sad and I forget to sync some events causing a collision in the calendars. If, like me, you have kids you’ll understand this results in hoping your babysitter can make time because you forgot to add some items in your calendar manually.

Continue reading “Sync your Outlook 365 calendar to Google Calendar with LogicApps”

Software Maintainability in the Cloud Era

Originally posted on SogetiLabs: https://labs.sogeti.com/software-maintainability-in-the-cloud-era/

The shift to cloud, and with that, to PaaS services or low code alternatives like LogicApps push the actual code developers see and use to the background.

There is an ISO standard on software quality, and the maintenance best practices are well written and explained in the book Building Maintainable Software. Within low code systems, applying these guidelines can be less obvious and it can be a difficult task automating and testing the quality of your code with tools like SonarQube.

Should we even worry about the underlying code? Absolutely. The principles still adhere and creating a spaghetti of your low code systems can cause major issues on maintenance or adding new features.

Let’s focus on three points of the maintainability guidelines:

  1. Write code once
  2. Couple architecture components loosely
  3. Automate development pipeline and tests

In no way these are the most important items, but for this example an easy entry into the low code space.

1. Write code once

Just like any other audit of software, you still can avoid writing duplicate code. In a platform like LogicApps it can be easy to repeat a custom call to something like a custom HTTP API.

In traditional languages like C#, you have many options to reuse your code. You could create a library, or you can create a package and make it available via NuGet. Within low code systems, these same packaging mechanisms not always exist.

Taking the example of LogicApps, the solution could be to create Custom Connectors. These will wrap your custom API calls into a reusable component you can share within your organisation, or even outside.

2. Couple architecture components loosely

If your components are tightly coupled, it can be troublesome to replace or refactor your components. The impact will be on each and every other component that has a high coupling with your part.

Again taking the LogicApps for example, let’s state our LogicApp calls another component directly using HTTP. The Azure Portal gives you this out of the box, letting you call Azure Functions directly from your LogicApp.

This goes agains the principle of loosely coupling. The reason is that your call is directly bound to that function, so changing the interface or location of your function, impacts the LogicApp directly. In this case, it would simply break and stop working.

To solve this problem, a simple solution is to decouple the LogicApp and the Azure Function using a queueing mechanism. This way, the message to the Azure Function is put on a queue by the LogicApp, and the Azure Function listens on a queue. Now, if the developer of the Azure Function changes location or even use another platform, there is no need to change the LogicApp.

Obviously this would require you to make an agreement on the contents of the messages on the queue.

3. Automate development pipeline and test

Automating your CICD pipelines allows you to more easily build, test and deploy your code. In case of a language like C# or Java, you can easily run tests, build your code, and create packages or deployments. A tool like Azure DevOps can combine these steps and lets you create a wealth of quality gates, checks and processes to guide your team.

When using low code platforms, it can be cumbersome to get the code into your version control systems. Nevertheless, many of those platforms do give you the tooling. LogiApps for example has template creators, and systems like OutSystems have their own CICD ecosystem.

In the end the automation allows you to more easily add steps to your CICD process, and allow you to deploy more frequently without any hassle. The addition of automated testing will absolutely be beneficial to the overall quality of your product.

Concluding

Treat your low code just like you would any other codebase. Almost all guidelines of mainainability can be mapped to your product. Some can may require a bit more investment, but in the end I truly believe it will help building a maintainable and high-quality (low) code base.

If you want to expand on the process part of high-quality software, please also take a look at the follow-up book of this series: Building Software Teams